​I Tried Using An Organizing App To Make Holiday Planning Less Stressful. Here’s What I Learned.

Organization has never been my strong suit. I’m not one of those people who can effortlessly juggle a million different tasks—and around the holidays, it gets even harder to stay on top of my never-ending to-do list.

It doesn’t help that my attempts at organizing our family calendar have always been kind of haphazard. I have an Excel spreadsheet for keeping track of wish lists and gift purchases. I set alarms in my phone to remind me when I need to bake for a holiday party or volunteer at my kids’ school. I keep separate Pinterest boards for dinner and dessert recipes, which I eventually copy onto scraps of paper and bring to the grocery store, along with the Google shopping list in my phone.

Needless to say, keeping track of all of those planning tools can be a task all its own, so I was more than willing to test-drive the free version of the family organizing app Cozi. (Even better, they were offering free holiday printables to help keep track of cards sent, gifts received, and holiday dinner cooking times.)

“Using an app to keep your family organized is like having a back-up for your brain,” says Lisa Zaslow, organizational expert and founder of Gotham Organizers in New York City. “If some of your organization systems are failing—or nonexistent!—try out an app and see if it helps.”

What did I have to lose, besides the ever-growing stack of sticky-note lists and reminders littering my desk? Here’s what I learned after two weeks of using an organizing app to streamline my holiday planning.

Family organizing apps keep everything in one place.

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With my planning tools scattered all over the place, it’s no wonder I often felt, well, scattered. It was easy to see the benefit of keeping all of my lists and to-dos in a single app in my phone, so they’re literally at my fingertips when I need them. (Here are 7 things all super-productive people do.)

But consistency is key, because an app can’t organize your life if you’re not actually using it. “For these types of apps to be really useful, you have to totally commit to using them for specific functions,” Zaslow says. “You do want to put all your eggs in one basket. For example, if you’re using an app for your holiday shopping lists—but you’ve also made a list that you left on your desk—the app won’t be that useful.”

For meal planning, it was a lifesaver.

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This was, by far, my favorite feature. The app includes a “recipe box,” which is preloaded with a few yummy dinner options, and you can also manually enter your own favorite family recipes. But here’s where it really simplifies the meal planning process: When you see an interesting recipe on the web, you can click the “share” option on your browser and send it to the Cozi app. Then, once it’s in your recipe box in the app, click the cart button and every ingredient will automatically pop up in your grocery list, organized under a helpful subhead so you know which recipe it’s for. (If you know you’re stocked up on a particular ingredient, just swipe right to delete it from the list.)

As someone who gets most of my recipes from random foodie blogs, this made meal planning so much more manageable—not just for the holidays, but for family meals throughout the week, too.

Try this amazing one-pan meal prep:

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Syncing calendars can prevent double-booking.

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With the Cozi app, the whole family shares one account, and everyone can sync their personal calendars to the main Cozi calendar. Because that main family calendar gets updated in real-time, you’re less likely to accidentally overbook yourself.

One important caveat: While you can link external calendars (like Google Calendar or iCloud Calendar) to the Cozi app, it’s not totally seamless. Your access to the external calendar is read-only. So if you add an event to the external calendar, you’ll see it in your Cozi app—but if you add an event to your Cozi calendar, it won’t appear on your external calendar. So, again, you need to really commit to using the app’s calendar for everything so you don’t miss an important commitment.

Shopping lists can be sorted by store.

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I tend to buy different groceries at different stores: fresh food from the supermarket, frozen food from Trader Joe’s, toiletries and snacks from Target, and so on. Add gift shopping into the mix, and it’s even harder to keep track of which items I’m supposed to be grabbing from which store. (No idea what to get for your husband? Here are 21 gifts he's secretly hoping for...) But with the app, I was able make separate shopping lists for each store, so when it’s time to shop, I can easily see where I need to go and what I need to buy once I get there.

For the best results, stick with the app.

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The free holiday printables were the main reason Cozi was on my radar in the first place—but once I got the hang of the app, I felt like paper printables kind of defeated the whole purpose of using an organization app. For starters, there was a printable for tracking gifts received, but not for organizing wish lists or tracking gifts purchased. And there was a printable for tracking holiday cards sent, but it only fit seven addresses per page, and my family is huge.

Still, it was undeniably easier having my family calendar, shopping lists, and holiday to-do list all in one place. And did I mention the meal-planning was a game-changer? An organization app may not replace all of my planning tools—for example, I’ll still keep my Christmas card list in a Word doc that prints directly to a sheet of address labels—but it’s made this holiday season feel a little less hectic.

Kara WahlgrenKara Wahlgren is a New Jersey-based freelance writer specializing in health, entertainment, and personal finance.

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